Fedora Weekly News Issue 157

In our last issue of 2008 Announcements reminds you of FWN's holiday schedule and presents the gift of the Omega distro, Planet is chock full of tasty tidbits from the Fedora blogosphere, Developments invites you to warm your hands over a "Nautilus Spatial-mode Flamewar", Documentation invites you to a "Holiday Hackfest", Translations reports on the re-organization of "Sponsors for cvsl10n", Artwork unwraps some shiny "Creation Highlights", SecurityAdvisories lists some ways to avoid a lump of coal from Santa, and the usual sleigh-load of Virtualization goodies includes instructions on "Building oVirt from Rawhide." We would like to thank our readers for their interest and attention and all our contributors for producing the goods week after week. May you all have a happy and relaxing holiday and we look forward to seeing you again in January 2009.

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page[1]. We welcome reader feedback: fedora-news-list@redhat.com

FUDCon Boston 2009

Fedora Remixes

Rahul Sundaram announced[2] the General Availability of Omega 10, "a Linux based operating system and a community Fedora Remix for desktop and laptop users."

Sundaram added, "It is a installable Live CD for regular PC (i686 architecture) systems. It has all the features of Fedora 10 and a number of additional multimedia players and codecs. You can play any multimedia including MP3 music or commercial DVD's out of the box."

For additional information, and to download Omega or view the kickstart used to create it, please read the full announcement.

Developments

Nautilus Spatial-mode Flamewar

The tired, old topic of whether nautilus should use "spatial-mode" as a default was re-opened[1] by MarkG85 in the form of a request for list subscribers to "vote" on the mailing list for a reversion to "browser-mode". In spatial-mode nautilus opens a new window for each directory unless one middle-clicks or holds the shift key down.

It was pointed out by several contributors that voting "+/- 1" was not a recognized way to achieve change within the Fedora Project. Chris Adams asked[2] if he and his friends "[...] should [...] all spam fedora-devel with +1' and metoo' to change the default background color? What if it is 20 friends, or 100, or 500?" A similar point was made[3] by Jef Spaleta.

Dimi Paun expressed[4] frustration with what he charcaterized as "lame community involvenment" and several personal attacks were made on both the maintainer and other contributors who had deprecated the attempt to take a mailing list vote. After tempers had flared Jeff commented[5]: "Noone has figured out how to write a markup language for human intention...and as a result any passionate discussion degrades severely as we are wired to read intention but without body language and vocal ques...we absolutely do it wrong when relying solely on written language. Even more so with English! If we mandated everyone encode thought into Lisp we'd be having more constructive discussions (and less of them). The productivity of the list would be through the roof."

In response to a challenge to detail some advantages of spatial-mode Tomas Torcz was among those who offered[6] that the persistent screen placement of directory windows was a major advantage. He also suggested a way to avoid leaving multiple windows open: "When I open new window and don't want parent directory open, I just open with middle button. Some people prefer Shift+click in this situation. I never has to use `Close all parent folder' (ctrlshift-w), but I aware it exist." Joonas Sarajärvi confirmed[7] the persistence as an advantage: "[...] the state of each folder is persistent. Every window opens in the same view that it had when I reopen them. I can have appropriate zoom levels and views for every directory I commonly use."

Very much later in the thread, after he had been referred to several times, the package maintainer Alexander Larsson replied[8] that he was unconvinced both by the tone and content of the argument that there was a case to be made for changing the default.

It is possible to choose which behavior one wants by at least two methods. One can either use the GUI

As part of the argument involved a desire to be able to replicate these settings automatically and possibly distribute them to others Matthias Clasen suggested[9] that anyone wishing to make permanent change to the default settings could create a sabayon profile.

Font Package Naming Guidelines

Nicholas Mailhot ensured[1] that everyone was made aware of the new font package naming rules for Fedora 11. These will help break up large font packages in order to allow users to obtain fonts from desired families without imposing a large download burden.

How to become a Co-Maintainer

Ray Van Dolson asked[1] for some information on identifying the current (co)maintainers of the proftpd package, the procedure to become a co-maintainer and the abilities to push bugfixes which this would confer upon him if the primary maintainer were absent.

A full answer was provided[2] by Patrice Dumas with links to PackageDB and the policies on the wiki regarding non-responsive maintainers.

Jason Tibbitts[3] and Jesse Keating[4] referenced IRC discussions of the practice and its advantages in checking the Obsoletes and Provides in discussion with Jochen Schmitt. Jochen was concerned[5] that the process be kept lightweight as opposed to a full review.

wxGTK2 to wxGTK Re-name

Michael Schwendt discovered[1] that a rename had been performed[2] some time ago so that there was no wxGTK2-devel package available. Dan Horák explained[3] that only audacity was affected. There was[4] some discussion about whether versioned Provides should be kept indefinitely.

RFC: Description Text in Packages

Follow-up action (see FWN#153[1]) was requested[2] by Richard Hughes for packagers to fix "isane descriptions" in their package summary text. Enlightenment was singled out as an example of an undesirable multi-page description. Richard also asked for comments on how bullet-points should be represented and the use of UTF-8.

A heated discussion followed[3] in which Nicolas Mailhot deprecated the possible development of a "broken application-side transcoding system". He advocated the use of UTF-8 over ASCII for several reasons including supporting the default Asian locales. Paragraph boundaries and lists were also mentioned[4] as a special area of concern.

This is a long and painful thread to read which expresses a conflict between constraints imposed by PackageKit and how things are currently done. Packagers should probably skim it to determine what final decisions are going to be made. Richard Hughes seemed[5] to decide to implement what seemed to him to be sane changes to gnome-packagekit in which "If you're [g]oing to use [UTF-8 representations of skull-and-crossbones and radiation-hazard symbols] in a spec file, then the text box is going to look rubbish and be all on one line. If you use a description longer than a few hundred words, gnome-packagekit will truncate it."

Documentation

Holiday Hackfest

This year there is going to be a Virtual Hackfest[0] with the goal of getting Fedora Documentation Project Guides up to date and ready for publication. Karsten presented a ToDo list[1] this week. The dates for the Hackfest are December 27, 2008 through January 4, 2009.

Translation

Sponsors for cvsl10n

The discussion about reorganizing the cvsl10n sponsorship process was restarted by KarstenWade[1], highlighting the long queue of new entrants waiting for sponsorhip. Currently, the policies governing the sponsorship process for the cvsl10n group do not ensure notification to the language team's co-ordinator of a new entrant, unless informed by the latter. As a result of a precaution taken by the current sponsor against arbitrary approval, the waiting queue has been growing. Suggested changes include, providing all the co-ordinators with sponsorship rights.

KarstenWade also suggested the renaming of the admin group to "l10n" instead of "cvsl10n".

Kudos for the Serbian Translation Team and FLP

OisinFeeley and PaulFrields informed[2] about the prompt work done by the Serbian contributors of the Fedora Localization Project, as part of Serbian Government's initiatives to localize open source software. An article in LWN[3] (available publicly after Dec 25th 2008) says that 99% work of the Fedora Translation was completed on time.

Artwork

Perspective and the Echo Icons

Martin Sourada called for a decision[1] on @fedora-art "we need to make final decisions about the new perspective to Echo and update the guidelines appropriately" with his proposal being "We will start new Echo Perspective icon theme which will * be developed in parallel to the current Echo * until it reaches good enough coverage, it will fallback to current Echo and gnome-icon-theme * use same Perspective Projection as in tango/mango for 32x32 icons and bigger, and in cases where it helps icon distinction in smaller sizes as well, Flat Perspective will be used for the rest * allow small amount of glows/glazes/shines in 256x256 version to achieve better realistic look * use ~ 1 px thick solid borders at all sizes"

The FUCCon Boston 2009 T-shirt

In a message addressed to both @fedora-art and @fedora-marketing Máirín Duffy asked for a vote[1] for the design of the official T-Shirt for the upcoming FUDCon in Boston "I made the design two-color so hopefully it'll be cheaper to print [...] There's two main designs that are just different in the treatment of the back portion of the shirt" and the majority of the respondents opted for one of them[2], which at the time of this writing should be already going to print.

Libvirt List

sVirt 0.20 Patch Request for Comments

James Morris announced[1] "the release of v0.20[2] of sVirt, a project to add security labeling support to Linux-based virtualization. I'm hoping to be able to propose an initial version for upstream merge within the next few minor releases, tasks for which are being scoped out
in the new TODO list[3]."

"If the current release passes review, the next major task will be to add
dynamic MCS labeling of domains and disk images for simple isolation."

Daniel P. Berrange said "this patch all looks pretty good to me from a the point of view of libvirt integration & XML config representation."

Latest libvirt on RHEL and CentOS 5.2

Marco Sinhoreli needed[1] libvirt 0.5.x
for testing oVirt on RHEL 5.2. Marco wondered what was necessary to update from the 0.3.x version available for RHEL.

Soon after, Daniel P. Berrange
"uploaded[2] a set of patches[3] which make libvirt 0.5.1 work with
RHEL-5's version of Xen. Basically we have to tweak a few version
assumptions to take account of fact that RHEL-5 Xen has a number of
feature backports like the new paravirt framebuffer and NUMA support."

"Of course running a newer libvirt on RHEL-5 is totally unsupported but
hopefully these will be usful to those who absolutely need this newer
libvirt and don't mind about lack of support."